DOT reveals options considered for Oakdale Merge fix

Options to ease weekday traffic jams at a notorious bottleneck on Sunrise Highway in Suffolk County include adding new or express lanes, installing a movable barrier to reverse the direction of vehicles and elevating a portion of the road, officials said Wednesday.

The preliminary options for work on the Oakdale Merge, a section of Sunrise where the service roads and Montauk Highway converge, run from as low as $20 million to as high as $700 million. Details of the fixes under consideration were released by the state Department of Transportation before a Wednesday evening public meeting  attended by about 400 people  at Oakdale-Bohemia Middle School in Oakdale.

Public officials have long said the current design causes delays and accidents; each day, about 126,000 cars travel the section of highway that passes through Connetquot River State Park Preserve.

The proposals include a viaduct ranging from 45 to 100 feet wide or a low, 100-foot wide bridge, documents show. And the department is evaluating adding two to four lanes and whether new shoulders should be narrower than usual or the full width.

At Wednesday night's public meeting, residents weighed in on the proposals.

Bob Vogelsang of East Islip, who has lived in the area for 60 years, glanced at the diagrams but didn’t see the one he thought would best alleviate the traffic problems: a tunnel.

“They’ve overbuilt in this area and when you have more people there’s more traffic,” he said as dozens of other people pointed at the aerial renderings while discussing them. “When there’s a fender bender on that road you’ve got a three-hour drive just to move a quarter of a mile.”

The Schmids of Bohemia said the same thing, that traffic is unbearable along the merged arteries, and that it’s the worst it has been in their 45 years as residents of the area.

“Every time they try to do something people talk about the environment and it ends up going nowhere,” said Carol Schmid, as she and her husband, Dan, started to examine each of the dozens of display boards surrounding the room.

Robert Caradonna, a civil engineer and 23-year Oakdale resident, said he preferred the options that include building a viaduct to ease congestion.

“Something has to be done because it’s not sustainable right now,” he said. “Any kind of viaduct separating traffic is good.”

Sunrise Highway cuts through the state park, which complicates the problem.

Currently, five lanes of traffic in each direction narrow to three. And vehicles entering from the Heckscher State Parkway and Southern State Parkway interchange add to the eastbound traffic volume, officials said.

Some trees in the state park might be felled, depending on which option is chosen, according to the Department of Transportation’s presentation.

A proposal to add two express car lanes — one in each direction — would cost $300 million to $350 million and would minimize how much land the department would have to acquire through the right-of-way process, the documents showed.

The "at-grade" options were substantially less costly: $20 million to $200 million.

Once a viaduct or bridge was included, the price tag shot up to $250 million to $700 million.

The most expensive option — adding four lanes and a 100-foot wide viaduct — outranked all the others in solving the problems the transportation department identified. They are: increasing the roads’ capacity, reducing traffic and accidents, and “improving geometric deficiencies,” flaws in designs that make roads less safe.

The proposal for a movable barrier got the most high scores for exploring ways of enhancing adjacent wetlands, parklands and a shared-use path.

In contrast, the most expensive option received zero scores for those categories, as well as for minimizing land acquisition and potential impacts on air quality, noise levels, and construction disturbances for nearby residents.

By January, the transportation department says it expects to finalize its study, after analyzing the public comments.

 Anyone can still submit comments until Dec. 28, according to the DOT. More information is available at https://www.dot.ny.gov/oakdalemerge. 

"Upon receiving input from the public on the study’s results, more detailed plans can potentially be developed," the department said on its website.